


Thank You

by Trytofocus



Series: Gallery AU [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gag, Gallery au, Hurt No Comfort, Imprisonment, M/M, No Sex, SHEITH - Freeform, Shibari, Shiro is evil as shit, Suspension, Voltron, Whump, dark!shiro, keith - Freeform, non con bondage, non sexual bondage, thank you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 03:24:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15677040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trytofocus/pseuds/Trytofocus
Summary: Keith is put in strict suspension bondage and hates every second of it.





	Thank You

**Author's Note:**

> Big messy AU, no order. Sorry about that.

By the time the riggers were done with him the drugs were starting to wear off. Suspension was a time consuming process and whatever was in his water made quick work of putting him in a lazy  daze, easy to manhandle into whatever they needed from him. Keith wasn’t a stranger to such treatment. Not anymore. They knew getting him to submit to being wrapped up and hung would be all but impossible, and as much as they loved him fighting and squirming and angry, that kind of bondage was simply too risky to brave with an unwilling subject. It was messed up that Keith knew they wouldn’t want him to be hurt, not really. Pinched nerves and blood vessels weren’t a good look, not in the long run. He wasn’t sure what they would do with him if he ever got hurt beyond repair. Would they let him go then? Would they kill him? He didn’t know what he preferred at that point. And while he was still worth something to them Keith was there, unfortunately, to stay. 

There just wasn’t anything else for him beyond this. His routine was dictated, strict and unyielding. The staff at the Gallery had imprisonment charted down to the nines. Making it an art. Making him art. Keith’s eyes glazed over the people beyond the glass of his exhibit, bringing themselves back into focus but only barely, as the drugs began to sizzle out of his system. Today there was glass. Which meant viewing only. Thank god. 

He let his head hang loosely down, testing the limits of where he could move. Feeling crept back into his limbs and it wasn’t long before he wished it hadn’t. His arms were tied behind him with so much rope he couldn’t register where on his torso there wasn’t any. Secured over his shoulders, chest and stomach, digging into his armpits where it was cinched and slip proof. One of his legs was bent and anchored ankle to thigh, pulled back so severely the fingers of his right hand brushed against his toes when he experimentally unclenched them. Wrists were completely immobile, tucked against the opposite elbows on each side. He could feel an uncomfortable stretch in his crotch where his other leg was pulled forward, a coil of rope above the knee securing it to his stomach as far up as it would go. Looking down at himself he could see that leg was free from the knee down but that wasn’t going to be any use to him hanging face down four feet in the air parallel to the floor. 

He moved his partially free leg, rotating the ankle and spreading his toes before letting it hang loose, just making sure it was there. Breathing was... possible. Thankfully his neck was left alone, but the tightness of the weight-bearing chest harness was making breath careful and controlled. Once he became aware of it he couldn’t stop thinking about how he might just simply forget to breathe, and his body would let him. 

Hands were still on him too, checking and double checking the bonds, occasionally rotating the suspension instead of walking over to the part they wanted to work on. It made him sick, but eventually the bigger ropework was all done. Final touches. Keith gasped when a rigger grabbed a fistfull of his hair and pulled his head up, braiding rope into it. 

“Please... no...” he managed weakly, voice groggy and thick with sedation, but it was no use. When the rigger was done he couldn’t put his head down anymore, it was secured to the ropes binding his arms and holding him up. His mouth fell open letting little moans of breathless pain escape freely where he couldn’t control them. His scalp hurt and his throat was pulled taunt by the strict position. When his voice broke and dried up he kept his mouth open still, anything to relieve the tension. And even though that was a conscious decision on his part, that too, was soon taken out of his hands. 

He caught the smirk of the rigger who shoved the ballgag in, fitting it snugly behind his teeth. It filled the space there and held his tongue down, strapped on under the rope that held his hair. He couldn’t do much more than glare down his nose, eyebrows knitting angrily and nose flaring. Furious.

“Oh don’t be like that,” the rigger said, standing back to regard his handiwork. “To be honest, it wasn’t on the agenda but you were practically begging for it.”  Keith sank his teeth hard into the rubber, feeling his eyes well and blinking it away. It would only make them happy to see him like this. When he left his field of vision, Keith could see in the glass reflection the ball was as big as he thought, and a vivid, attention grabbing red. His jaw ached. 

He was left there like that, with nothing but a final parting pat on the shoulder from one of them and a less than kind push to his knee from the other, making him swing and rotate in the rig. He screamed into the gag in frustration but the personnel door was already shutting behind him, in front of him, behind him, in front of him... He closed his eyes and willed himself not to be sick till it mellowed out. 

His partially free leg could be used to control the swing somewhat, but not by much. He found himself moving it whichever way he could out of boredom, out of pain, out of helplessness. Whenever the glass was in front of him his head position made his eyes fall onto the spectators behind it. All watching him with that insatiable hunger in their eyes, unbearable scrutiny, loving him, adoring him, speaking about him among themselves as though he was a piece to critique and not a living, breathing, prisoner. He could see some sickeningly familiar faces by now, people who came to his viewings again and again among the changing wanderlings who passed from exhibit to exhibit. Patrons. 

The most dedicated one never failed to show up, standing somewhere off to the side, leaning on a luxurious marbled wall with his gloved hands crossed over his chest. Beside his head hung an art piece by a famous painter even Keith vaguely recognized, but the patron didn’t pay it a smidge of attention. Cold, grey eyes trained on the glass, only occasionally flickering to the other patrons before returning that laser focus back onto  _ him _ . As though Keith was somehow his own personal trinket he’d put on display for others to marvel at. Keith thought it couldn’t be right, but something about the way the Gallery owner sometimes addressed him personally made it seem like this wasn’t just another bastard with a bottomless bank account. It might have been someone big, a politician, or a celebrity... with his sights set on Keith as they were, that terrified him more than anything the staff could have ever done to him.

His bound body swung in a lazy circle, eyes half closed just trying to breathe through the aches and the cramping muscles. He imagined his arms going red, then blue, then purple, then black. Imagined the roots of his hairs ripping out his skull. He would take it, for the chance to work out the stitch in his nape, and to ease the airflow in between disordered, rapid breaths. He hated the drooling a gag usually forced out of him, but at least in that position it slipped down his chin onto the ground and nowhere else on his body. Whatever they did with climate control made him sweat too, he was too warm to be comfortable in his own skin and feeling the beads of sweat chase each other all over his body was maddening. 

He twitched when a droplet snaked its way down his ribcage, pooling at his abs before falling to the ground. Rewarding the spectators with a struggle was something he always tried to avoid, knowing that’s what they’re there for. When he was new, his fight was what drew them all to him, the patrons who financed and curated his tortures always found new and terrible things for him to be put in just for the chance of seeing him squirm. He always tried to avoid giving them what they paid for but it was never truly an option. 

He was in pain, physical and mental, the longer he hung there like a christmas decoration the more shame and humiliation he felt, the angrier he got. Soon he couldn’t control his own need to fidget, to make any and all attempts to get comfortable even in the impossible situation he was in. Soon he began to pull and claw and twitch inside the ropes as if anything at all he could do could save him. Even while rationally knowing there simply wasn’t a way out he had to fight. And the fight was relentless. Exhausting. His own unintelligible feral screams filled the glass room he was in, echoing from the walls back at him like a mocking parrot. Delighted patrons smiled, and some stepped closer to get a better look.    
  
The fingers of his hands clenched and unclenched, his eyes screwed shut and he managed to bend over slightly as a muffled scream rattled his entire body and left him without air, only to hang there, in the unforgiving ropes. His pain was entertainment and it would never ever stop.    
  
When his tired eyes opened it was the one Patron in his face, hands pressed to the glass, sharp eyes searing holes into him. If Keith could talk he would plead, he would beg for this to end, despite himself, despite everything. This one Patron was important and he could probably influence what happened to him. It occurred to Keith then, that today might have been His machination which meant it was exactly where he wanted him anyway. As he swung slowly sideways Keith noticed that behind the Patron the viewing room was now empty. How long had he been hanging there, screaming and painful and raw? Was this the end?    
  
His rotation came back to the glass again and he used his leg to right himself before the man at the other side of the glass. All he could do was jerk his chin at the Patron, and raise his eyebrows, neighing into his gag pathetically. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping for, but the cruel, half smile that spread on the Patron’s face wasn’t it. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but it pushed him past anger and straight into despair. He closed his eyes and let the tears come, distantly registering a metallic knock on the glass. It startled him into looking, through the tears, but it was just a gloved hand. Just the hand and the smile. The bridge of his nose hidden behind a styled fringe of white hair.    
  
Keith let his head loll to the side as much as it would go, feeling himself slip then. He couldn’t care anymore about his breathing, or about how his body felt like it would never be unstuck from this position. He let the knocking fade into the beat of his own heart in his head until hands were there, on him, lowering him down. His chin rested on the floor and it was a moment before Keith realized his hair was loose around his face once more. The ropes were never cut, only unbound, which took time, and he would lie there, motionless until they were done. The fight in him was gone, extinguished by that smile, that knocking metal sound, telling him he was wanted. He would never truly rest until this place was done with him. He would never be free.    
  
His arms spilled forward when the ropes fell away around him, marked and raw and numb. Someone  _ tsked  _ at him, throwing a remark about how he couldn’t even ungag himself now that he was free. Pathetic.    
  
It was the same rigger from before, but Keith couldn’t find the spark in him to challenge. The man bent down on his knees before his face and reached behind his head to undo the straps there, finally,  _ finally  _ guiding the rubber out of his mouth. Keith’s jaw refused to work for several alarming seconds before he managed to eventually swallow his own spit for the first time in what must have been hours. His tongue wet on his lips felt like heaven, the little sensations coming back to him a miracle he couldn’t stop himself from treasuring.    
  
The words were out of his mouth before he thought to stop himself.    
  
“Thank you,” he said breathlessly, while the riggers moved on to untying his legs. He was sure the Patron was still there, watching them work, watching him lie limply on the floor of a glass box as other people touched and handled him, grateful. 


End file.
